Building Trustworthy Network Automation, From Principles to Practice#

Damien Garros

• Why: The trust problem is why automation adoption stalls — teams don't delegate critical network operations to systems whose failure behavior they can't predict. This is the cleanest principles-to-patterns treatment at the conference.
• What: A framework of design principles that make automation trustworthy, explicitly "built on mistakes, refined by experience": idempotency, dry-run, transactional commit/rollback, declarative over imperative workflows, version control, and testing.
• How: The slides include a useful comparison table: imperative workflows make idempotency, dry-run, and transactionality hard; declarative makes them easy; version control gives all three nearly free. Patterns shown: dry-run before apply, diff-based changes, state verification, grouping changes so they either all commit or all roll back, plus process advice (enforce business process in workflows, safe defaults, "integrate what you can, build what you must").
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable, tool-agnostic; these principles map onto any automation stack (Nornir, Ansible, Terraform, orchestrators).